The 78-year-old Hoban is Pennsylvania-born, but moved to London in 1968. He served briefly in WWII, but hepatitis brought a discharge. His writing career – he started as a commercial illustrator and copywriter – began with children's books, inspired by his four children of his first marriage.

Some of you might have come across such books, even read them as children: What Does It Do and How Does It Work?, Bedtime for Frances, Herman the Loser, The Sea-Thing Child, various Captain Najork books, and most recently, Jim's Lion.

His marriage broke up after the move to London. Wife Lillian returned to the States with the four children, where she continued her career as a top-notch illustrator. Hoban met German Gundula Ahl at Truslove and Hanson, a bookstore on Sloane Street. There she worked as a 'book siren' (his description). Wanting only one book, "...she made sure I left having bought about eight," he said of her. They married in 1975, after his divorce came through, and have three sons. I tell you all this because many of his books have these wonderful descriptions of London, albeit not in a common way. Yet, he managed to arouse in me a sense of nostalgia for London, which had been my home for a number of years. So many of the places he mentions are also places well known to me. Gundel, as he calls his wife, clearly inspired his inclination to use German words and names. As anyone familiar with the language knows, it lends itself well to witty contortions and nonsensical wordplay. I am sure, no disrespect is meant.

The three books I want to tell you about are Kleinzeit, Pilgermann, and The Medusa Frequency. Each book is its own entity. Each has its own style. This is one of Hoban's trademarks. He is indefinable as a novelist. Some see him as a science fiction writer because of Riddley Walker, a book Anthony Burgess called "one of the 99 outstanding achievements of fiction in the English language since World War II." Hoban, however, has written so many other books not in this genre that one runs into instant trouble by this definition. A certain cult status has grown around him, and I can well understand why. His books require the reader’s full attention, but once given, they reward this attention tremendously. Each novel offers a different kind of satisfaction, for each is a little jewel in a most original setting.

He wrote Kleinzeit in 1974. It was his second novel written in London, and is a tour de force of the imagination. In the books he draws on his own experiences of being in hospital. In England, as I know very well, being in a hospital ward means being in a large room with eight or more beds and respective patients. Just think of that whenever someone here complains about having to share a hospital room with three others. It is a thought to keep in mind.

Hoban's protagonist, Kleinzeit, may or may not necessarily be based on him, but like him he once worked in an ad agency (creating adverts i.e. ads). While in hospital, Kleinzeit is asked by Sister (the term the British use for a senior nurse) if Kleinzeit means anything in German. He tells her it means 'hero&', but later we learn it can also mean smalltime, depending on who makes the translation. Of course, there is no such word in German. Klein does mean small, and Zeit does mean time, but unlike so many other German words, which are drawn together ad infinitum to turn adjectives, adverbs, and verbs into very long nouns, in this case it does not apply. So, the joke is set.

Kleinzeit must be approached with a completely open mind. One has to be willing to go on an adventure in which not only the characters speak, but also the Underground (subway), the hospital, the bed, a mirror, a glockenspiel, and some unusual, perhaps even sinister, yellow duplicator paper, size: din A4, 64 mill in weight, bought at Ryman’s. Ah, the memories flood back at such description. If you live in London, you buy your paper at Ryman Stationers, and use paper in DIN sizes quite different from North American sizing.

DIN stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization), which adopted the paper size in 1922. It is based on the square root of two (height to width ratio), and A4 equals 210 mm x 297 mm. I leave the conversion to inches to you, but by now DIN has become ISO standard and is even used by the United Nations in New York. The paper is slightly narrower than our standard 8.5" x 11" paper and slightly longer. Britain adopted the size in 1959, shortly before I arrived there. It appears, only in North America remains a hold-out, and here one hopes it will prevail. Vive la différence!

Don't be misled in Kleinzeit by the unusual names of diseases. They are wonderfully original. Kleinzeit, for instance, suffers from hypotenuse, diapason, and asymptotes; in other words, he is out of kilter. It's a life and death situation, but Kleinzeit, who is no hero, nevertheless plays a little game with Death. More, I do not wish to say because that would rob you of the enjoyment of reading this book.

The next book I want to talk about is Pilgermann. It was written after his famous Riddley Walker, which took him five years to complete and came out in 1980. Pilgermann was published in 1983. Again we have a semi-German title. A Pilger is a male pilgrim, Mann means man, and I believe that Pilgermann may well be its Yiddish form. In this book Hoban returns to his roots. Having been brought up a secular Jew, he discovered that after going through the ordeal of writing the futuristic Riddley Walker,"The Jew in me wanted a voice and Pilgermann happened."

The novel transposes the reader to the 11^th century and the events prior and during the First Crusade. Readers might like to refer to Umberto Eco's book, Baudolino , which is all about the Fourth Crusade, to get another view of the tumultuous two centuries, when Christians attempted to rid the Holy Land of the dominance of the Muslims.

Pilgermann, by the time he reaches our consciousness, is a spirit, a something he isn't quite sure of, perhaps just a 'whispering out of the dust,' a something of fleeting time that shows us that all earthly things eventually crumble away. "What I am now is waves and particles, I don't need to walk around, I just go." He calls himself Pilgermann because he can no longer remember his name, and he compares himself to an owl.

The idea for Pilgermann came to Hoban when his daughter Esmé and her husband took him to Montfort in Galilee, an impressive fortification built by the Teutonic Order of Saint Mary in the 12^th century and enlarged in the 13^th. "The look of the stars burning and flickering over Montfort, those three stars between the Virgin and the Lion with their upward swing like the curve of a scythe, the stare of the darkness, the hooded eagleness of the stronghold high above the gorge, the paling into dawn of its gathered flaunt and power precipitated Pilgermann into his time and place and me into a place I hadn't even know was there," Hoban tells us in his Acknowledgments to the novel.

To see this castle in a spot so alien to its architecture must be an impressive experience for anyone, but all the more so for a fertile imagination such as Hoban's. What resulted from this vision is a novel well worth reading. It is a fairly dark story, but also a story filled with humour and wisdom; it is a reflection on human nature, death, the passage of time, even on art, and geometric patterns.

Pilgermann is a German Jew, who after an adulterous tryst with the wife of his town's tax collector, turns a wrong corner and gets caught by a mob out to hunt down Jews. Something rather horrific happens to him, but he survives his ordeal, sells all his property and decides to follow Christian pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem.

I can tell you that he got as far as Antioch. There he enters into an agreement with a philosophically inclined Muslim merchant by the unusual name of Bembel Rudzuk (and here again we must marvel at Hoban's ability to think up names) to create a huge, tiled geometric pattern. The book even provides us with a copy of this pattern that we can interpreted in any way we like, but which Pilgermann called Hidden Lion. In the centre of this tiled pattern stands an observation tower.

What happens to Pilgermann and the tiled masterwork is not for me to reveal. Nor do I want to tell you of the many companions that accompanied him on his way from his German town to his final destination. These you must discover yourself. Be prepared to accept that Pilgermann is not easy to read, but once you delve into it, like you dive into a cold pool that soon refreshes you and then appears to be warm, you will find you will be rewarded with an exhilarating experience that you will warm to as you follow Pilgermann's adventure.

The third of the novels is The Medusa Frequency. This book was published in 1987. It is far easier to read than Pilgermann, although once again Hoban's fertile imagination has created a most uncommon story. This book has inspired Hoban fans to call themselves The Kraken and to celebrate his birthday on February 4 as Hoban Day. Not many writers can claim such devotion, not even J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, although she sells more of her books than Hoban.

In this book the protaganist is a comic book illustrator and obscure novelist, Herman Orff. Here one wonders if Hoban chose the last name on purpose to remind us of the composer Karl Orff, who gave us Carmina Burana. Why? Because to break his writer's block, Herman Orff subjects himself to some strange, musical therapy that involves a Fairlight CMI computer.

That computer may not ring much of a bell with the average person, but let me explain. It was the most promising synthesizer (computer musical instrument) that came on the market in the early 1980s from Australia, a place not known for high tech inventions. It was very expensive, but several well-known musicians bought these machines to help them create music. So, Hoban did not invent this part of his book. In fact, he researches his material meticulously as Pilgermann reveals. In the story, Orff gets a treatment that is akin to an EEG using the Fairlight and music created by one Istvan Fallok. He is a fellow to be wary of as our protagonist soon learns.

In The Medusa Frequency we once again meet the head of Orpheus, whom we first encounter at the end of Kleinzeit. In Medusa, however, the head is no incidental piece of flotsam and jetsam, it is an important part of the book. For this novel is about search, and Orpheus is, of course, in constant search for Eurydice, whom he lost in the Underworld. Orff, too, searches. He is looking for his lost inspiration, and for a lost love, Luise, a woman who embodies for him the perpetual lostness of Eurydice. Soon Orpheus's tale and Orff's own become intertwined in a brawny, but poetic blend of mythology and droll reality.

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